For me, it’s board games. I figured a few good board games could last a while. I’m sure you are (incorrectly) guessing the next step, that I just bought too many.
No, I bought Kingdom Death: Monster. And now I want the expansion packs, which combine to nearly $3000.
KD:M may have its imperfections, but I don’t think I’ve ever played another game quite so beautiful (if you’re into that existential dread type of beauty).
Maybe you can help me. I don’t understand “boardgame people.” Like, enjoy boardgames and tabletop games, but not playing a brand new one every time we get together.
What’s wrong with playing poker or Catan or NBA Jam for the thousandth time?
A lot of board game geeks hate Catan. I also hate Catan, but my reasons probably aren’t their reasons. So there’s that.
But I don’t entirely disagree. It’s complicated. I bought multiple games to find ones I’d love more. I find most people with board game obsession still have a favorite.
Like me, I’ve spent more time playing KD:M and Spirit Island than the next 5 combined.
I also have a butt load of boardgames, I like playing Catan not a lot but maybe once a year. The ones I keep going back to are Star wars epic duels, Eldritch Horror, and Arcadia/Starcadia Quest.
Eldrich Horror is on my to-buy list. My wife got really burned out on board games so I’ve leaned into my ultra-crunchy solo-friendly stuff, but she enjoyed Arkham horror for quite a while.
But yeah. Last time I played Catan I wanted it to stop by round 2. I have horrible dice-luck, so a game’s gotta be fun when I roll worst-case 5-10 rounds in a row. In Catan, it means I get all nerdy placing my towns on strategically sound intersections, and then watch everyone else play and I pass as numbers like 6 and 8 never roll for an entire game. My record is like the first half of the game getting no resources. Then getting one or two. Something about seeing the 3rd or 4th 2 roll give someone resources before you’ve gotten anything just makes you want to flip the table.
I get what you mean lol. I used to get pissed at the luck, but enjoyed when I was outsmarted. Now I enjoy all outcomes cause I have been able to get others into boardgames. If I play with new people I try to play towards getting them to win cause that gets them to want to play more. And once everyone knows how to play I get to play an earnest game. I’ll even take a day off work every month to get friends together for boardgames, food, and drinks.
I guess that’s kind of a reason I have so many boardgames, depending who’s playing we might enjoy one more than another. But I noticed more people liking the co-op ones more than vs games lately. Started with pandemic, then Arkham Horror and Mansions of Madness, and now Eldritch Horror is what we’ve played most. Hopefully I get to try some of the new ones I got, looking forward to Unfathomable.
I agree re: coop. They seem to be the way of the future. Some people I game with get really frustrated being less competitive than the rest in games like Dominion, where taking your time and planning out your turns has huge return but makes everyone have to sit and wait (and don’t talk to me, I’m figuring out whether I’m going to play my Laboratory or my Sentry first!)
For some reason, though, Pandemic goes over like a dead weight to most people. So much so, I’ve never bought Pandemic Legacy as good as it looks. Arkham horror is too crunchy for some, but just right for others. Spirit Island, surprisingly, has been a sweet spot for some recently. It’s a little hard to get good at, but the sliding difficulty scale is really granular.
Oh man, my friend bought that game and has been trying to get us to play it, but I had twins, and have not more time for board games. It looked fun though
It’s incredible, and a blast. A full campaign (assuming you don’t lose halfway through) runs about 60 hours. So I get it :)
The digital version might be more accessible. I really wish they’d sell it without the minis. I just don’t have the time to paint minis, which means I don’t get the value worth in minis.
I had the good fortune of meeting a couple of board game nerds before getting into the hobby myself. They had a seperate insurance policy specifically for their games.
Interesting. Because you were doing too well? The only way KD:M gets a little boring to me is if I’m trying to min-max and only fighting the most appropriate monster for maximum return at each twist or turn. All those underleveled lions for 15 rounds, then all those antelopes, avoiding phoenix and any unique monsters, etc. I did a playthrough where I suicided extra population against most bosses instead of risking my better ones. Ok, that can get boring.
But throw all those in? Nothing quite like going for the overpowered unique phoenix and trying to land his death bonus on my character with Immortal disorder. Also nothing quite like that character making it, then constantly being targeted with “instead of damage, roll on critical injury table” and having to blow my party’s rerolls to save her. (For the record, no she didn’t make it to LY30)
But honestly, to each their own. I really enjoy it. And adding a few more hunt or showdown monsters (when you really “know” your base prey) is enough to keep an entire campaign fresh. And if not, PotSun and PotStars is a blast (said in Tabletop Simulator because I can’t afford all that)
Comparison with Kingdom Death? Interesting. I made a point of watching a few let’s plays of Pathfinder the Adventure Card game, and it seems to me as similar as Catan and Pandemic (which is, not at all)
The comparison I see is Townfolk Tussle, which I intend to someday buy for a faster/easier campaign.
I had a small 160L tank, cost about 1000 dollars. Kept spending money buying more zoas and palys before I realized the filefish was eating them - he never did it while I was watching and started about 3 months after having him. Cute little gobshite though. Isolated him in a temporary tank, but then aiptasia started growing. Filefish back, zoas got munched. Left the hobby now but I fear I might do it all again.
Just a tank and some lights, add some flow and boom! You’re there. Just get some salt and testing kits to keep things in balance. Those Hanna checkers are nice if you want to splurge - but that’s it, you’re done! I mean…. You have to get the fish and corals too - but you can make friends and get frags for free! Then you’re really done. Everything beyond that is automation, you don’t have to do any of it (although you can really dial in your nutrient balance if you use protein skimmer, algae scrubber, refugium, media reactors). But you don’t want to do that because then you’ll need a sump (but aren’t sumps handy? Who doesn’t want a sump?). Just make sure your stand accommodates everything-you don’t want to rebuild a stand. Leave room for controllers and uv meters and all that other stuff just in case you add it in the future - which you’re not going to becasue it’s expensive and overkill…
Homelab (running home servers). Especially since I’m in Canada so I pay out the ass for shipping. Got into it purely out of interest for server administration, programming (computer science in general really) and the desire to experiment on my own hardware, but I’ll have you know I have a total of 48 processing cores and 30 TB of storage running my personal fileserver and “private cloud!” Though not relying on the likes of Google for data storage and “cloud” services is a massive genuine benefit!
I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially “donating” it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I’m consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.
I also run BOINC and Folding@Home on the excess computing power in the winter, essentially “donating” it to science, which is perfect because my house only has electric baseboard heating anyway so I’m consuming the same amount of electricity for heating either way, and the electricity sources are mostly renewables where I live! The home office is toasty all winter, if kind of loud.
If this was a standard home feature in cold climates that would be awesome. There’s schemes where they have farms that pipe their heat into homes, but that’s a lot of extra infrastructure for something that’s fundamentally easy to decentralise.
I’ve heard people proposing a “computational electric heater” in the past where it’s just a really powerful computer that can do citizen science processing (or presumably whatever you want on it). I suppose the only issue is cost of sufficiently powerful processors that generate enough heat to actually work as a heater, as well as the thermal regulation system since semiconductors are way more temperature sensitive than a coil of resistive wire, shorter lifespan too I imagine. Though if we can overcome these issues that would be a massive technological milestone.
It would be a really good use of old computers instead of throwing them out though, could use them as space heaters in a place where you don’t mind the noise and/or find a way to dampen the noise while allowing the heat to come through.
Come to think of it, I actually don’t know what the compute footprint of an average first-world person is. If we moved all the racks into people’s houses (in a sound-proof enclosure or something) would that be enough?
It doesn’t have to be that expensive if you keep it modest though. I have an old Dell Optiplex (I think from 2012?) that I run a fair amount of stuff on. Things like Jellyfin (with Sonarr/Radarr/etc), a finance tracking web app, Home Assistant, a wiki, and some other miscellaneous stuff. I don’t have a ton of storage though. Currently just the 512gb SSD that the OS is on. I have a couple 8TB HDDs that I want to get setup but they’re a little loud for being in my bedroom.
The big thing I notice is that it can really struggle to encode media if it’s not in the right format. It doesn’t have much of a GPU though so that doesn’t help. And more modern hardware would be much better too, but this is fine for my needs at the moment.
D&D. When I got back into it as an adult it was mostly because I could get into it for $0. I was dead broke at the time. I pirated the books downloaded the free basic rules 😉 on my trash find laptop and was good to go.
But man once I had money it turns out I really like collecting books and the D&D ones are not cheap. I do not want to think about how much I’ve spent.
The real flood gates opened when the license controversy happened and I decided to try other RPGs. Multiple core books of multiple RPGs gets expensive fast 😁
I’m a few hundred dollars in and I’m actually on my way out thanks to their grossness this spring. I’m too slow to have gone for many modules, but rules books were super fun and thus a money sink. I’m trying to move my group over to PbtA (cheap by comparison) or Genesys (have you seen the cost of those DICE?!).
I’m not sure it can get worse than bird watching. Completely free to start. Then you are like “man I wish I could see that bird over there” so you buy some binoculars. Then you think “dang this bird is moving too fast I still can’t identify it, maybe I should try photographing it”. Two months later you’ve spent 10k because bird photography is apparently the most intense kind of photography. Turns out photographing very tiny things that move very fast from very far away is very difficult and the lenses you need start at thousands of dollars and go up to tens of thousands of dollars. That isn’t including the camera body, which you probably want very fast autofocus on, along with bird eye tracking, which hardly comes on any cameras at all.
That sounds like bird photography is the problem. Bird watching is still pretty cheap. Just enjoy the experience of watching birds in the moment; you don’t have to capture it for later.
Oh sorry I guess I didn’t really expand on that. Part of why I like bird watching is that all (almost all) of the apps to identify birds are free. But then you have to actually be able to input parameters and stuff. So then you need to be able to pick out small details in a split second at a very long range. Even then, sometimes it’s not possible without help from others. So bird photography helps with the identification (and scientific study) of the birds.
I thought, I can buy a Hornady press, use range brass, and same some cash!
And, well, kind of. But mostly no. Yes, buying primers, bullets, and powder, and using range brass is indeed cheaper than buying boxes or cases of ammunition on a per bullet basis. Sure, a set of dies can get expensive ($200+ for match-grade dies if you do, e.g. long range shooting competitions). Oh, and you need to clean your brass, preferably in a wet tumbler, and then dry your brass, and also get a trim station to trim to length, and possibly a primer pocket swager if you’ve picked up military brass with crimped primer pockets… And a scale, you gotta have a good scale so that you know exactly how much powder you’re using (seriously; you need a good scale, you cannot skip this), and you need a chronography to measure speeds to develop the most accurate loads…
…And then you start getting into progressive reloading presses that are intended for really high volume shooting that start at around $2000, and top out at around $10k, plus things like annealing stations so that your neck tension is always consistent after you’ve crimped the case, and powder tricklers for when volumetric powder dispensers aren’t accurate enough…
But the real expense hits when you’re shooting 10x as much because now ammunition is “cheap”.
BRB, gonna spend $400 on 8# of Varget powder and $300 on 1000 Hornady ELD-M .224 bullets.
Making electronic music. You can get lots of software tools for free, so I started out with those.
Then I realized how many details get lost, depending on what speaker/headphones you use, so bought myself higher quality headphones. As in, quite high-end for normies, but obviously, I’m at the lower end for music production hardware.
Now I’m considering buying a MIDI keyboard, because those software tools don’t quite emulate proper piano playing. Although, you could obviously also spend money on getting different software tools. And of course, on a quadrillion plugins for these software tools, to produce different sounds.
I’m just glad that my other hobby is programming, so when my music-self gets excited about an idea, my programming-self will want to solve it.
…and then never finish what music-self wanted, but at least we’re distracted from spending money.
They’re generally said to deliver the sound-quality of medium-grade studio headphones for the price of low-grade ones. But that also means, aside from the sound quality, these are really basic headphones.
You should also mind that they’re open-back. So, they have no noise cancelling, neither active nor passive. You have to use these in a silent room.
If you’re wondering, because it doesn’t sound like I’ve actually spent much money yet, yeah, I’m generally quite frugal. I’m mostly just intimidated by all the options to spend money.
But well, my setup is:
Laptop running Linux (that already rules out buying most VST plugins, as those are often Windows-only).
Headphones: Sennheiser HD 560S (←only real money, I’ve spent so far)
For a DAW, I’ve been dabbling with LMMS. Felt more approachable to me than Ardour. I also enjoy dicking around with Surge-XT as one quite powerful VST/LV2 plugin.
I’m a traditionally trained musician, so I also enjoy creating electronic music via sheet music. And me being a programmer/weirdo, I like Lilypond for that (basically LaTeX for sheet music), despite it not being built for that…
Started out with a cheap printer, mostly to supply my friends with miniatures and terrain. They loved the stuff I printed for them, so gave me money for my effort, which went into upgrading my printer and buying more supplies and buying a new printer so I could print better, bigger things for them.
Then, so enamored by what 3d printing could do, they bought their own 3d printers.
and now no one talks to me cause I no longer have any use and i’m stuck with a printer I havent even removed from the box and assembled for 3 years, and another printer that only stays around because every 2-3 months something comes up where I can design and print a part to fix something around the house.
I have been trying to get into 3D printing! It sounds so cool! Can’t you connect your printers to the cloud so that other can print using your setup? Maybe you can charge for their usage based on your costs.
Hey, there are some fun 3D printing projects you could get into if you look around. Sometimes it’s the perfect tool to launch into a new hobby! I’m working on a hydroponic tower currently, as well as some Mandalorian armor for Halloween.
3D modelling. It's impossible to get into 3D modelling and not get eventually sucked into 3D Printing... Which as other people have explained on the thread, is it's own money sinker.
Just make a friend who is very into 3d printing and you can null out their costs of buying models! There are also makerspaces in some cities that have publicly accessible 3d printers (and other cool stuff like sticker machines, cnc machines, etc) and even some libraries have 3d printers available that you can access
I used to be there… now I’ve got three sets of shelves from Costco full up of boxes, bins, trays, tools, bits, and bobs. Finding used electronics bench devices like power supplies, multimeters, oscopes, and soldering stations is an ongoing effort to do at a reasonable price point.
Music production. Started with a old pc and a pirated version of ableton. Now I bought my first top tier laptop and a license of ableton… and oh whats that around the corner? Is that a modular synth?
Oh boy I know exactly where my next spare money is going… first a syntakt and after that my eurorack journey will finally begin! And I will be broke and happy!
Before you get into physical modular synths, have you tried VCV Rack? It could exacerbate things for you, but it helped me avoid/delay falling into the rabbit hole of buying such hardware haha.
My humble used office desktop turned NAS quickly became a dual-processor, 64GB ECC machine with more storage and processing power than I’ll probably ever need.
Vinyl records… 25 years ago you could hardly buy them . I listen to punk and they never gave up on the format and so it was cheap and collectible because print runs were small… from 2010 onwards, they came back in fashion and the major labels started clogging up the pressing plants and then pre-orders became a thing and the price started creeping up…now, in my country a vinyl that used to be $20 is now pushing $55 and mainstream artists are pushing $70 …my desire has really waned… I’m priced out of finding new artists because I can’t buy everything all the time like I used to.
I can appreciate the appeal of physical copies, but if it’s hindering your enjoyment then why not just listen to digital copies? The vinyl records are probably being scribed from a digital version, anyway.
Not OP, but I generally do listen to most of my music via streaming these days but it sucks: it’s not immersive, sound quality is garbage and I miss the ritual of examining the art and liner notes while listening. When you listen to an LP you’re more invested in it because you paid for it and also because you’re in proximity to the record being payed and you’re physically interacting with it. you end up listening to the songs in the context and sequence that they’re supposed to be listened to.
I know that a lot of this is intangible, but there is value in it
I have 1500 LPs from my collecting days but have bought only a handful of records in the last few years for this reason. Last time I mail ordered 2 LPs it came to $75.
You start off with just your computer and a free copy of Virtual DJ Home; next thing you know you’re spending $1300 on just a single turntable, and as we know you need at least two, plus a mixer, plus the $400 software needed to run it all.
Or you could go the vinyl route as a DJ and end up spending $70 on a single record as you’ve stated. Either way, you’re spending thousands.
Came here to also say knitting! Which also lead to me spinning yarn, which lead to processing my own fleece/fibers, then dyeing….just waiting for the day I decide to buy sheep and goats
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